3 tips to help you cover opinion polling during the 2026 elections

Transparency, methodological gold standards and survey weighting: Those were three of many topics covered during two webinars The Journalist’s Resource recently hosted featuring Roper iPoll, from The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

Roper iPoll is a comprehensive opinion data research platform that offers access to nearly a million survey and poll questions from 1935 to today. Eligible small media organizations and independent journalists can apply for a one-year membership to Roper iPoll.

Kathleen Weldon, director of data operations at the Roper Center, discussed how journalists can use Roper iPoll to access both up-to-date and historical opinion polls.

With the 2026 U.S. primaries underway, keep reading for three insights that will help you accurately cover opinion polls. These takeaways are from both webinars, held on Feb. 26 and March 4. And check out our past work on covering surveys and polls and understanding question order bias.

1. Good polls will be transparent about their methodologies

Methodological transparency is the foundation of reliable polling data.

“You can’t say that any particular poll is great just because it’s transparent,” Weldon said. “There can be bad polls that are transparent. However, it is very uncommon for good polls to not be transparent.”

The code of ethics of the Association for Public Opinion Research, a major professional organization for public opinion survey professionals, requires that member organizations commit to transparency in how they design, conduct, analyze and report their surveys and findings.

“What we push over and over again is transparency, transparency, transparency,” Weldon said. “It’s the only way that you can ensure that the people who are doing the research are acting in good faith — that they’re willing to share their information, and to allow people to interrogate the data.”

2. There’s no single gold standard for survey methodology

Phone surveys with live interviewers and random digit dialing has long been considered the gold standard of public opinion polling. But response rates have fallen over recent decades — people don’t answer their phones like they used to — and new polling methods have emerged.

“There’s really no certainty that there is one method that is appropriate in all situations — that can be said to be a perfect gold standard,” Weldon said. “There is a method that does represent most of what currently comes into our archive. And that is online probability polling.”

In probability-based sampling, pollsters randomly select participants. This helps reduce bias in results. If everyone in a population being sampled has an equal chance of being selected, there should be an equal chance that all potential answers to questions will be represented.

3. Take a close look at survey weighting

Non-probability online samples are another common methodology that journalists may encounter when reporting on polling data.

They may include “opt-in” surveys, where people choose to participate. And because these online samples are not random, they may introduce bias.

Some pollsters use sophisticated weighting methods to try to overcome potential bias and ensure their results more closely represent the population being studied. For example, if the target population is 50% men and 50% women, but 40% of respondents were women and 60% were men, the responses from women would count more than those from men in the final results.

“Definitely pay attention to weighting,” Weldon said. “Is there something they’re not weighting to that seems like it should be there? Almost all of them are weighting to sex and age. People have been waiting to sex and age since the beginning of polling. But some of the other things — like education and income, or even access to the internet — those types of things can be really valuable weights.”